The Isle

## The Isle: Beautiful, Brutal and Still Broken After 11 Years Honestly, it is just another survival game, and one that is absolutely riddled with bugs. The premise could not be simpler: stay alive. You eat, drink, grow and kill. That is essentially the entire gameplay loop. They are dinosaurs, so there is obviously a limit to what they can do, but once your basic needs are met, the game gives you very little meaningful reason to keep moving. Boredom inevitably turns into aggression. Carnivores kill when they are not hungry. Herbivores kill other herbivores for no apparent reason. Players will chase you halfway across the map simply because they saw you, wiping out hours of progress for a few minutes of entertainment. What is supposed to feel like a prehistoric ecosystem quickly becomes a painfully slow deathmatch in which everyone has spent several hours levelling their character before being allowed to participate. ### The new-player experience is miserable Starting as a new player is confusing, lonely and needlessly hostile. You are small, starving and vulnerable, with very little idea where to find food, water or safety. Almost every dinosaur you encounter appears to be deciding whether it can eat you, including members of your own species. Cannibalism is everywhere because half the server seems to be starving to death. You would assume grouping with other players would make survival easier, but coordinating without voice chat is awkward. You have to press Enter and stop controlling your dinosaur properly just to type, making communication during a chase almost impossible. Even group or party messages can be visible to nearby players, so your brilliant tactical discussion may also be helping the thing currently hunting you. Solo players are already at a serious disadvantage, yet the communication system makes finding and working with a group far more difficult than it should be. ### Half the game is spent staring into darkness The in-game day uses a 24-hour cycle, and roughly half of it is night. After the latest patch, darkness is not merely atmospheric; it is practically unplayable. You can barely see what is directly in front of you, so the sensible strategy is often to stop moving and hope that one of the lunatics sprinting around in the dark does not accidentally find you. That means a significant portion of your dinosaur survival experience consists of sitting still, staring at a nearly black screen and praying that the word **DECEASED** does not suddenly appear. Truly gripping gameplay. ### Herrera climbing is almost impressive in how unreliable it is Herreras are supposedly able to climb **“ANY” surface**. Apparently, “any” does not include many trees in the swamp, despite that being one of their main spawn areas. It also excludes certain rocks, concrete structures and whatever mountain the game has decided you are not allowed to climb today. You can be running normally and suddenly start sliding backwards while another player casually runs up the same slope beside you. Jumping rarely fixes it. Once the game decides you are a prehistoric toboggan, you are apparently committed to the descent. Trees should be the Herrera’s safest territory, and you will spend most of your life hiding in them. Unfortunately, many branches begin ejecting you once you become larger or fully grown. Nothing says specialised arboreal predator quite like being rejected by a tree. If something catches you while you are small, it can often stand on your back and prevent you from escaping. There is little you can do except wait to die. When the attacker has a weaker bite, such as a Troodon or Austroraptor, the result is not a narrow opportunity to escape. It is simply a much longer death. You can spend several minutes pinned underneath something while it slowly chews through you. You are not merely dead. You are dead with an unskippable cutscene. ### Combat cannot be trusted Poor hit registration and desynchronisation make fights feel as though you and the server are playing two different games. You can be bitten by something that appears nowhere near you. Your own attacks can pass through another dinosaur without registering. Players jump between positions, rubber-band or hit you from distances that make no sense. That would be annoying in any multiplayer game. In a permadeath game, where one unreliable hit can erase several hours of growth, it is unacceptable. Deaths should feel like the result of a mistake, a bad decision or a better opponent. They should not leave you wondering whether the server briefly decided your dinosaur was standing somewhere else. ### Lower graphics settings can give players an advantage The rendering system creates an even more ridiculous problem. You can be resting as a crocodile in reeds at the side of a river, believing you are completely hidden. On your screen, the vegetation is covering you exactly as intended. A player using lower graphical settings may not see those reeds from the same distance. They only see you. By the time they move closer and the vegetation finally renders in, it no longer matters. They have already spotted you, marked your position and decided whether you are worth attacking. In a survival game built around camouflage, stalking and ambushes, lower visual quality should not function as predator vision. Players should not be punished for making the game look better. ### The performance is baffling I am not attempting to run The Isle on an ancient office computer. I am playing on a high-end laptop with an **RTX 5090 Laptop GPU**, yet the frame rate can still behave like a random-number generator. When unlocked, it can bounce from approximately **244 FPS to 0**, causing severe stuttering, frame drops and screen tearing. Locking the game to **60 FPS** seems to make it more stable. Think about that. My solution to getting acceptable performance from one of the most powerful laptop GPUs available is effectively asking the game to stop trying so hard. The Isle has been in development for around **11 years**. After that amount of time, players should not still be dealing with unreliable performance, broken terrain, inconsistent climbing, severe desync, questionable hit detection and deaths caused by technical failures. At some point, “Early Access” stops being an explanation and becomes a permanent excuse. ### And yet, I am still playing it Here is the embarrassing part: I am more than **90 hours deep**, and I currently have no intention of quitting. Take that however you will. Clearly, I am a sucker for punishment. Underneath all the frustration, The Isle can create moments that very few other games manage. I enjoy a good jump scare, and hearing something enormous moving through dense vegetation beside you can genuinely make you jump. The environments can look stunning. The lighting, detail and colour saturation create an incredible atmosphere, and the dinosaur models are **far better than those in any other dinosaur game I have played**. When it works, it is tense, beautiful and genuinely immersive. Unfortunately, those moments are surrounded by hours of growing, hiding and travelling, followed by the possibility of getting stuck on a rock, sliding down a mountain, being hit by something that appears three metres away or being murdered by a bored herbivore. ### Would I recommend it? Yes, but with a condition. Start a **one-hour-and-55-minute timer** when you launch it. Try a few dinosaurs. Explore the map. Experience the atmosphere. Get frightened by something hiding in a bush. Then, before you pass the refund window, ask yourself one important question: **Am I enjoying this, or have I already developed Stockholm syndrome?** If you dislike it, refund it. If you enjoy it, welcome aboard. You will probably complain about it, swear you are finished with it and then launch it again the following day. Apparently, that is The Isle.

Good game

Está lleno de bugs, crashea, está mal optimizado, los devs son lentos y odian a su propia comunidad, hay lag, lleva como 10 años en early access, te hace pasar rabia... Sin embargo ahí va el mejor juego de dinosaurios que he jugado en mi vida y de los mejores juegos survival que he conocido :')

Cool game

good

HAY !

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